Famed gardener and writer. William Robinson was born in County Down, Ireland on 15 July 1838 and died in East Grinstead, Sussex on 12 May 1935. His father, a land agent, deserted his family while Robinson was a child. He became an apprentice gardener at different estates before going to the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens in 1861, whence he was soon recommended to the Royal Botanic Society’s garden in Regent’s Park, London. There Robinson became Foreman of the Education Department, began to write reports of gardens for the Gardeners’ Chronicle, and in 1866 was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society.In 1867, having left Regent’s Park, he attended the International Exposition in Paris as a reporter for The Times, and wrote a long commentary on the horticultural exhibits. His French experience yielded two books, Gleanings from French Gardens (1868) and The Parks, Promenades and Gardens of Paris (1869). In 1870 he published the first important book on Alpine Flowers for English Gardens, and the first edition of his Wild Garden. Altogether he was to write nineteen books, on subjects ranging from mushroom growing to cremation. In 1871 he started his first magazine, The Garden; he was later to found Gardening Illustrated in 1883, and Flora and Sylva in 1903. In 1885 he acquired a country house, Gravetye Manor near East Grinstead in Sussex, where he developed an important garden; he also carried out some commissions designing alterations to existing gardens.Robinson’s most important book, The English Flower Garden, was first published in 1883, and continually revised until its fifteenth edition in 1933. The first edition was more an anthology of the leading gardening writers of the day than a text by Robinson, whose major contribution was a polemical introduction. As editions went by, Robinson rewrote more of the work himself, and the proportion of introductory text on design and plant selection increased. A pugnacious journalist, Robinson wrote each edition around an enemy: in the first editions, the formal gardeners of the mid-nineteenth century (among them Joseph Paxton); from the mid 1890s, the formal gardeners of the century’s end, especially Reginald Blomfield; after World War I, the proponents of topiary. Robinson’s ideas changed over the years, but, as he became older, he back-dated his revised tastes and created an image of himself as a single-handed rebel against the degenerate taste of the mid nineteenth century. He achieved this reputation partly through rhetoric and partly by outliving his contemporaries. In his period of greatest influence, from the Edwardian period through the 1920s, his enthusiasms – hardy flower gardening, wild gardens, rock gardens and herbaceous borders – were perceived as forming a unified style. His concept of the wild garden, however, was much misinterpreted: Robinson insisted that it meant the naturalizing of exotic plants that did not require maintenance, and as a result helped to popularize many plants later considered dangerously invasive.An advocate of cremation, Robinson designed the gardens at Golders Green Crematorium, where he was cremated and his ashes scattered.